Slashdot Mirror
3Dwm Updates
Robert Karlsson writes "3Dwm, the Three-dimensional window manager, an open source project at Chalmers Medialab, has just released a new, extensive release of 3Dwm, release 0.2.2 - VNC support, 3D scene graph, big texture splitting, client connection, framework, 3D materials support, testsuite added." miles away from a real desktop, but a great testbed for those ideas that are way ahead of their time.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather this existed than not, but wtf, how is this "way ahead of its time"!?!?!?
If the only thing we can vary in our user interfaces is how many dimensions they display, its going to be a long time before we make any inroads into dealing with large amounts of data using arbitrarily generated paradigms that minimize the energy input required to acquire a particular piece of information.
DATA--that is, what computers deal with--DOES NOT require a user interface mapped to the tangible nature of our reality.
People seem obsessed with the question, "Where is it??? How is it arranged?? How is it layed out???" while the question "WHAT is it??" seems to elude them.
Sorry if this post seems angry, but this isn't ahead of its time at all. Our interfaces and computers are BEHIND the times. (assuming objective time... yeah, we're both wrong I guess)
Just my $.02, and yes, I am working on my own interface, but I am only 1 person, so it's going to be awhile.
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Disgruntled AC
I'm one of the core developers of 3Dwm, and I've watched with horrid fascination as the webserver was nearly toppled by the tremendous /.-onslaught just recently (have a look at the logs). Now, browsing the comments, I thought I should post and clear up some points.
First of all, yes, 3Dwm is misnamed. 3Dwm is NOT an X11 window manager, it is a user environment (the beginnings of the 3D-equivalent of X11). However, the name has stuck with us since our first appearance on Slashdot, so we don't want to change it.
Secondly, the main platform for 3Dwm is not normal desktop computers (though it does run on desktop systems), but Virtual Reality devices (like this one). In Virtual Reality, you have some amazing 3D interaction possibilities that few existing applications exploit.
As for VNC support, 3Dwm has VNC client (not server) functionality, just as one observant slashdotter pointed out. This allows us, in a network-transparent fashion that is in keeping with the distributed nature of the rest of 3Dwm, to display graphical desktops of any major windowing system (including Windows, X11, and MacOS) in 3D.
There's always skeptics who wonder what you would use a system like this for when 2D is perfectly fine. To that I can only answer that there are, in fact, areas where 3D could help a great deal, mainly in the fields of design, modelling, and information visualization. Why, take a look at this (and this and this) screenshot for a prototype 3D web browser.
Btw, today marks the one-year anniversary of our last slashdotting (I wrote up a short summary of the comments we got last time). Cool, eh? :)